Philip J. Deloria

VOTED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS IN NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES BY THE MEMBERSHIP OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES ASSOCIATION

WINNER OF THE JOHN C. EWERS BOOK AWARD, GIVEN BY THE WESTERN HISTORY ASSOCIATION

Despite
the passage of time, our vision of Native Americans remains locked
up within powerful stereotypes. Thats why some images of Indians
can be so unexpected and disorienting: What is Geronimo doing sitting
in a Cadillac? Why is an Indian woman in beaded buckskin sitting
under a salon hairdryer? Such images startle and challenge our outdated
visions, even as the latter continue to dominate relations between
Native and non-Native Americans.

Philip Deloria explores this cultural discordance to show how stereotypes
and Indian experiences have competed for ascendancy in the wake
of the military conquest of Native America and the nations
subsequent embrace of Native authenticity. Rewriting
the story of the national encounter with modernity, Deloria provides
revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected thingssinging
opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywoodin ways that suggest
new directions for American Indian history.

Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesa
time when, according to most standard American narratives, Indian
people almost dropped out of history itselfDeloria argues
that a great many Indians engaged the very same forces of modernization
that were leading non-Indians to reevaluate their own under-standings
of themselves and their society. He examines longstanding stereotypes
of Indians as invariably violent, suggesting that even as such views
continued in American popular culture, they were also transformed
by the violence at Wounded Knee. He tells how Indians came to represent
themselves in Wild West shows and Hollywood films and also examines
sports, music, and even Indian peoples use of the automobilean
ironic counterpoint to todays highways teeming with Dakota
pick-ups and Cherokee sport utility vehicles.

Throughout, Deloria shows us anomalies that resist pigeonholing
and force us to rethink familiar expectations. Whether considering
the Hollywood films of James Young Deer or the Hall of Fame baseball
career of pitcher Charles Albert Bender, he persuasively demonstrates
that a significant number of Indian people engaged in modernityand
helped shape its anxieties and its texturesat the very moment
they were being defined as primitive.

These secret histories, Deloria suggests, compel us
to reconsider our own current expectations about what Indian people
should be, how they should act, and even what they should look like.
More important, he shows how such seemingly harmless (even if unconscious)
expectations contribute to the racism and injustice that still haunt
the experience of many Native American people today.

“A trenchant and enlightening examination of American
Indian identity and of federal policy that has affected it.”--Montana The Magazine of Western History

“An eminently readable work. . . . Deloria tells some
achingly beautiful stories of the kinds of lives his own relatives managed to carve out in the face of white expectations.”--Multicultural Review

“Highly recommended for public, high school, and academic libraries with multicultural interests.”--Library Journal

“Deloria succeeds brilliantly.”--Journal of the West

“Deloria’s endpoint is to quiz stereotypes for their impact on ideological discourse, which he accomplishes with humor, grace, and depth. Highly recommended.”—Choice

“Subtle and complex, this fascinating, well-researched book will no doubt find its way into unexpected places of honor in American cultural studies.”—Santa Fe New Mexican

An excellent book that reveals a secret history of Indian
modernity too often obscured by our powerful wish to associate
Indians with the traditional, the primitive, and the blanket.--Werner
Sollors, author of Neither Black Nor White Yet Both

Well written, funny, thoughtful and thought provoking.
The chapter on athletics, framed by family history, is a particular
gem.--Brian W. Dippie, author of The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy

The thematic and chronological sweep of Delorias
brilliant new book is remarkable.--David R. Roediger,
author of The Wages of Whiteness and Colored White

“Deloria is as good a cultural historian as there is writing today. Here he takes what in lesser hands would be the ephemera of American Indian life and uses it to illuminate a whole world not apart from American society but locked in the heart of it.”—Richard White, author of It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the American West

“A provocative, intriguing, and fascinating book that demonstrates a new sophistication in cultural studies about identity and power, continuity and change, and authenticity and artifice.”—George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger

PHILIP J. DELORIA of Dakota Sioux heritage, is professor
of history and director of the Program in American Culture at the
University of Michigan. He is author of Playing Indian and
coeditor of the Blackwell Companion to Native American History.